Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Seven years ago, Donald Trump bought a vineyard and winery in Albemarle County, Virginia, a few miles south of Monticello. The property had belonged to the ex-wife of John Kluge, the late founder of Metromedia (which later transformed into Fox News) and once the richest man in America. Kluge’s 1,300-acre property went to his former wife, Patricia, in a divorce settlement, and it was she who had the vineyard planted and a small winery built.

According to Trump’s son, Eric, his father doesn’t drink and bought the property because “wine’s sexy.” In so doing, Trump joined the ranks of a relatively new class in America, the “lifestyle vintner,” a type of hobbyist investor who makes money in another field and then buys into wine, mostly for the social and financial cachet. Trump is but the most famous of them; the owners of thousands of smaller enterprises across the country—wine’s now made in every state in the union—qualify as well.

Vintner is a word that implies a knowledge of vines, husbandry, and winemaking, and a significant amount of physical labor. Not so the lifestyle vintner. It is a somewhat deprecating honorarium for mostly wealthy individuals with none of the above. Their surnames hover artfully on bottles of cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay, all deeply punted and impressively expensive.

These bottles are social entrées of a sort, often representing a quick, handy makeover. Former labels—oil man, developer, sports mogul, tech entrepreneur, financier—are jettisoned for a new title redolent of European nobility. Those defined by their accumulation of money turn their backs on that past, benefiting from a kind of lay transubstantiation in which wine washes any previous grubby associations away.

Lifestyle vintners’ websites sag with paeans to nature, viticulture, and terroir (as well as, of course, themselves). But few truly embody the back-to-the-land credo of the ‘60s and ‘70s that made world-famous places like Napa Valley, now first choice for American lifestyle vintnerhood. I have been writing about Napa since the mid-‘80s and have watched this increasingly glamorized culture change the nature of the valley for the worse. The wines have become—with notable exceptions—standardized, and the gap between real agriculture and the glamorized version has grown.

This has proved to be a very lucrative distinction. Napa wine accounts for only 4 percent of California’s total, but in conjunction with tourism and related industries generates about $13 billion a year, according to trade-group estimates. Though it’s impossible to say precisely how much revenue is earned by lifestyle vintners, it is considerable—and made possible in large part by capable immigrant labor.

Thanks to the rise of the lifestyle vintner, the market is now glutted with new wines in a numbingly similar style. Critics generally favor them, most costing well over $100 a bottle, and as a result many of the richest American palates have developed a taste for alcoholic, overripe cabernet. Napa still has its small, inspired producers, but also mega-companies—Constellation, Treasury Wine Estates, Kendall-Jackson, Gallo—that churn out bottles for nationwide distribution.

Lifestyle vintners have also left their mark on Napa’s landscape. Most refer to themselves with straight faces as “farmers,” even as “environmentalists,” while more trees are cut on surrounding mountainsides for yet more vineyards. They loudly praise the valley’s exemplary past and glorious future while exploiting its present. For instance, a prominent computer-boom beneficiary named Mike Davis has spent more millions on his sprawling new winery than will likely ever be recovered through wine sales. Since the Napa Valley floor is all planted, only the hillsides are available for new vineyards. And Davis is bent on scraping out a vineyard high on Howell Mountain that would adversely affect a precious wildlife preserve, one of the state’s most biologically rich remnants. (Davis did not respond to an interview request.)

There’s been a clamor over similar plots of land as a changing climate has prompted vintners to get the most out of Napa before possibly having to move on to the Pacific Northwest or the Rockies. Many lifestyle vintners are developers who resent objections to their plans by members of the community. Such names are common on labels. One—Craig Hall of HALL Wines—has been in a decade-long struggle with a local community that’s trying to prevent his cutting of some 14,000 oaks on more than 2,300 acres in a remote part of the county. A Dallas developer and former co-owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Hall, like Trump, has bounced back from bankruptcy and moves among high-risk investments.

Hall’s new project in Napa would deforest a 2,300-acre untrammeled swath that has never been ravaged by forest fires and supports many very old trees. This destruction wouldn’t be for something useful like growing food, but rather for yet more derivative wine beyond the financial reach of most people. Locals fear that mansions will follow, as they so often do in California. (Hall declined to be interviewed for this story, and a representative of his referred me to the county’s public records about the new project.)

After several disputes like this, social discord has grown steadily in the valley. Thousands of Napans signed a petition to put an initiative on the 2016 ballot to increase regulation of timber cutting in the hills. But a phalanx of trade groups—the Napa Valley Vintners (the host of an exclusive annual wine auction), the Napa Valley Grapegrowers, and the Winegrowers of Napa County (a coalition of corporations and wealthy individuals)—opposed it. The industry’s sway was clear when the county disqualified the initiative on a technicality.

A similar initiative is back on the ballot this year, but as lifestyle vintners leave their mark on the landscape, the influence of a different type of vintner is receding. Salvestrin Vineyards lies at the end of a dirt driveway just up Highway 29 from its antithesis, HALL. Its white-frame farmhouse was built in 1879, adjacent to a vineyard that was planted in 1859. The owner today, Rich Salvestrin, is blue-eyed, burly, and burnished by the California sun. His grandfather came to the area from Northern Italy, via Ellis Island. “He helped neighbors with their vines, and bartered his labor for the use of a horse,” Salvestrin said. “My father took over, and in 1950 bought a tractor. I’ve been tied to this land for as long as I can remember.”

Salvestrin worked in the vineyard growing up and is a useful case study in the opportunities and difficulties of small winemakers in Napa Valley. Salvestrin Vineyards is 18 acres—less than it used to be, as he sold some acreage to the local school—adding value to the crop by turning it into wine that is sold at a much higher price. But there construction stopped. The operation supports his family, including three daughters, and his parents who still live in the house. As for current tensions between development and agriculture, Salvestrin says, “We’re at the tipping point. This place should be about the wine.” More and more people are thinking just that.

Book Review: James Conaway on the Napa Valley Wine Wars

Hegel wrote that the Owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk, suggesting that wisdom (the owl) finally awakes when the day is nearly done and the opportunity to benefit from insight has almost passed. It is a sad thought — I hope that Hegel is wrong — but it captures pretty well the gist of this new book by James Conaway, who has been writing about the Napa Valley for many years.

Conaway’s new book presents a series of vignettes and profiles that collective capture the ongoing wine war in the Napa Valley. Conaway is not a neutral observer in this battle, so this is a tale of white hats and black hats.

The White Hats include Andy Beckstoffer, Volker Eislele, and Randy Dunn, leaders in movements to preserve Napa’s farming and environmental heritage. The Black Hats include Mike Davis, Jean Charles Boisset, and especially Kathryn and Craig Hall, who have told their side of the wine wars story in their book A Perfect Score.

Reading Conaway’s book about what’s wrong with the Napa Valley made me sad because it reminds me about something that is wrong with society today. The Napa Valley of Conaway’s book is full of people with their backs to the wall, angry, suspicious, and unwilling to bend or compromise. Reminds me of any number of issues in society today (guns and immigration, for example).

There doesn’t seem be much room for meaningful dialogue. Sometimes it seems like there isn’t even a common language, much less common values or goals. Gridlock prevails: movement is slowed or stifled, but threats remain.

Only at the very end of the book — dusk, I suppose, or last light — does Conaway give a sense that there might be some coming together, working together. Hope it is not too late. But recent news is not encouraging.

Pressures continue to grow. Last week, for example, the Napa Country Board of Supervisors voted to put an initiative on the June ballot that would shut off development in certain areas. Pro and con forces seem to be prepared for a serious fight over the future. Meanwhile an interview with James Conaway suggests that he’s given up hope. Too little, too late.

I learned a lot about the Napa Valley, wine wars, and the White Hat and Black Hat combatants from this book, but I admit to being disappointed. Conaway takes a strong stand with his White Hat friends and his anger and outrage come through clearly. But I wonder what the conflict looks like from the perspective those who are in the middle, trying to balance interests and reconcile development and environment before the last light is gone? That’s a book that I would like to read.

Not that there aren’t glimpses here of what a working consensus might look like. I was especially intrigued by the sixteenth chapter, which gives an account of how John Williams of Frogs Leap Winery led a successful movement to restore a stretch of the Napa River. Water, Conaway suggests, is at the root of all conflict in Napa. Rivers both divide and unite. The Williams story shows that it is at least sometimes possible to find common ground.

Building that common ground where shared values are developed and real progress can be made is important both for Napa and for society in general. Having started with Hegel’s owl, I conclude with William Butler Yeats’ falcon, from “The Second Coming.”

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …

Friday, March 2, 2018

It's not about the wine anymore, it's the real estate, according to author James Conaway.

By W. Blake Gray | Posted Friday, 02-Mar-2018

If you're a fan of Napa Valley wines, James Conaway's new book "Napa at Last Light" might make you unhappy.

The book, Conaway's third about the valley, is a portrait of a community with inept and possibly corrupt politicians undermining agricultural protections without public hearings at the behest of corporate interests. He complains that all the major vintners' and grapegrowers' organizations are complicit in over-development, and posits that new vineyards have become more about real-estate flipping than creating good wines.

"Vineyards have become stalking horses for houses, and for ways for lifestyle vintner wannabes to get a toehold," Conaway told me by phone from his home in Washington, DC. "The valley is over-planted for the water table. The hillsides and mountainsides are part of the historic provenance of this place. It is time to say, no more carving out of vineyards in the watershed, for environmental reasons and aesthetic reasons."

This is not your usual wine book, but Conaway says that he is not a wine writer. I posed the thought to Conaway in a phone interview: that the book might make fans of Napa wine unhappy.

"Well, shouldn't it?" he bristled. "People should be kept in ignorance so they'll be happy? Is that the point of journalism? I'm a fan of Napa Valley. And some of the vintners. But what has happened there is that a wonderful self-made unique community has been taken over by corporate interests. It shouldn't make you happy. What happened there is not happy. Some of the conflicts there are fascinating. Good books don't always make you happy. If you're a fan of Napa Valley wines, why not ask questions about the provenance of the wine? Not what its alcohol is, or what the interests of the owners are. You should ask who owns it. How did he or she make their money? What side are they on? What part did they take in the past struggles? This isn't a wine book, Blake."

Conaway, a Memphis native, still has his accent after living in Europe for several years. He's the author of 13 books, including two previous non-fiction books on Napa Valley and one work of fiction set in the valley. He started his career as a police reporter in New Orleans and all of his Napa books focus much more on the workings of government than the machinations of winemakers.

If his answer to my question sounded angry, you should read the book. He's seething from the very beginning, against some of the usual targets – Robert Parker and the overripe wines Parker favors – and against some that get scant attention elsewhere.

But he also, literally, lends a hand to the preservation of the valley. In one of the most dramatic sections of the book, Conaway helps Randy Dunn prepare for wildfires on Howell Mountain, staying with him to clear rain gutters and chainsaw dead branches for long after the sheriff's department told them to evacuate.

"Randy's a friend. I've known him for a long time," Conaway said. "I called him up and he said, it doesn't look too good. I asked him how many people he had up there to help him get ready. He didn't have any. I said, I'll come up and give you some help. It was exhausting. It was really interesting. What you realize when you're on the ground is that nobody knows what's going on when you're close to a fire. Randy flies his own plane so he has pretty sophisticated weather prediction stuff. But you still couldn't really tell what was going to happen. I didn't worry about it that much during the day. But when it starts to get dark, you start to wonder, should I get out of here or not? We didn't. Everybody was gone. We made a big fat hamburger and drank a little wine. We went to bed not really knowing what was going to happen."

His main attention, though, goes to the gutting of the landmark agricultural preserve law that Napa Countycreated in the 1960s. In Conaway's tale, the law was undermined without a public hearing by redefining wine marketing as "agriculture." This was accomplished, Conaway writes, because corporate interests have backed the candidates they favor for the Board of Supervisors, notably Alfredo Pedrozo, who was just 29 when he took over as board Chairman.

"There's so much money sloshing around, Conaway says. "Everybody wants to get in: sports figures, entrepreneurs from Asia. Everybody who's selling real estate thinks it's wonderful. Now they're talking about people getting more planning rights on plantable land in the valley to build visitation centers. They've already got nearly 500 actual wineries. Then you've got another structure, you've got parking lots, you've got sewage, you've got all the problems. The government has changed the definition of agriculture to make that legal."

"Tourism is the real harvest in Napa today," Conaway says. "Not grapes. Eventing. You measure how well you're doing by your eventing harvest."

But there is still an important fight upcoming over oak trees and the county's watershed. The end of the book follows environmentalists as they succeed in getting enough votes to put a measure limiting tree cutting on this year's June ballot. It may be the "last light" of the title.

"Wouldn't it be nice if somehow or other, the vintners who were concerned spoke out and affected some change," Conaway said. "People started putting limits. They change the definition of agriculture back to what it used to be. These might be considered draconian steps, but wouldn't it be great if that happened?"

Napa expert grim about the state and direction of the valley: ‘I don’t see any hope’

Few people have spent more time thinking and writing about the Napa Valley than author James Conaway. Now, on the eve of the publication of this third book about the region, Conaway finds himself under gray skies, pessimistic and alarmed about the valley’s state and direction.

“I saw it as a special place when I first went there,” Conaway said in a phone interview from his home in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. “But it has become jaded, and I guess I have, too.

Conaway has been visiting Napa for more than three decades, first as a wine columnist, more recently as a freelance writer. His principal muse has been the valley’s evolution from quiet agricultural enclave to the nation’s most precious and popular wine region.

From his visits he has harvested three books: “Napa: The Story of an American Eden” in 1990; “The Far Side of Eden: New Money, Old Land, and the Battle for Napa Valley” in 2002; and now “Napa at Last Light: America’s Eden in an Age of Calamity” (Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $26), to be released March 6.

With his books, focused more on social history than wine, Conaway has been working to determine whether Napa Valley is on course to retain its agrarian traditions and culture – a preserved and cherished agricultural Yosemite, if you will – or morph into a viticultural Disneyland, vineyards as sideshows, wineries as thrill rides.

His trilogy ends with no definitive answer, but his outlook is as dark as the title of his latest installment. “I don’t see any hope,” he said. “It’s too late for it to become an agricultural Yosemite. I hope the pressure to clear hillsides abates, but I don’t have much faith in its stopping.”

The timing for “Napa at Last Light” is astute. Napa Valley’s grape-growing and winemaking community is recognizing the 50th anniversary of its standing as the country’s first agricultural preserve, a series of measures that began to take hold in 1968 to protect nearly 32,000 acres of farmland from development.

At the same time, several residents and environmentalists, agitated by concerns over traffic congestion, water availability, deforestation, pollution and erosion in the valley, are lobbying for more restrictions on wine-related exploitation. For one, Napa County supervisors are weighing whether to put on the June ballot an initiative to safeguard the oak woodlands on hills above the valley floor from vineyard development.

When Conaway started his series, Napa Valley in attitude and practice was akin to Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ideal, where farmers, by their careful, devoted, hands-on stewardship of the land, represented the backbone of democracy, he said.

Since then, however, many of the principal players in the founding of Napa Valley’s modern wine trade – several of whom were proponents of measures to maintain the region’s agricultural essence – have died or have sold out to a “conglomerate class” that doesn’t share their sense of community, sensitivity and vision.

Conaway laments that many of the family wineries pivotal in establishing Napa Valley’s reputation as a fine-wine region – Mondavi, Martini, Beringer, Raymond, Stag’s Leap, among others – are in the hands of corporate CEOs rather than scions. By contrast, he notes, many French wineries have been in the same family for centuries.

“The ultimate goal of a corporation is profit – not community, not the environment, not agriculture. They are going to go where the profit is,” Conaway said.

He sees in Napa Valley a parallel with Silicon Valley; but instead of high-tech startups getting established and then selling out to large corporations, it’s vineyards and wineries. Cabernet sauvignon is just the latest hot app. And in their search for profits, those corporate vintners – and some not so corporate – put at least as much emphasis on marketing as on growing grapes and making wine, thus their preoccupation with “hospitality,” a euphemism for “tourism.”Granted, some wineries, even in Napa Valley, have difficulty getting effective distribution for their wines, thus their need to sell on-site. But even wineries with distribution beyond Napa Valley can enhance their profits by eliminating the middleman and selling at home, Conaway notes.

As a consequence, over the past 30 years, he argues, Napa Valley’s agricultural regulations quietly have been tweaked to broaden the concept of a winery so it can draw more visitors via fashion boutiques, art galleries, conference accommodations, “event centers” for concerts, weddings and the like. Wine-pairing salons, for example, really are de-facto restaurants, compromising space for growing grapes and making wine while exacerbating congestion and pollution.

The plow, in short, has been cleaned, polished and turned on its side as a salver to serve adorable canapes in a posh lounge that once was a barn.

And that’s just the start of Napa Valley’s transformation into something other than an agricultural enclave, Conaway argues, raising the specter of either prime farmland or the valley’s bracketing hills being sculpted into tony real-estate developments.

“Can solastalgia – that existential distress caused by environmental loss – be mirrored in a glass of wine?” he muses in “Last Light.”

Conaway is a public-policy wonk, but he leavens his reporting on procedure and politics with fine-line sketches and revealing anecdotes of several influential members of Napa Valley’s winemaking community, not all of them villainous.

One is winemaker Randy Dunn of Dunn Vineyards on Howell Mountain in the valley’s northeastern hills, who, with his wife Lori, was instrumental in persuading the Land Trust of Napa County to successfully pursue “the single-most generous conservation act in the valley’s history” – the creation of Dunn-Wildlake Ranch, a 4,000-acre former hunting spread between St. Helena and Calistoga and “the largest contiguous protected landscape in Napa County.”

Another is grape grower Andy Beckstoffer, “perhaps the most powerful vineyard owner in the Napa Valley,” Conaway writes. Beckstoffer’s holdings include a chunk of the esteemed To Kalon Vineyard, which dates from 1868. As Conaway tells it, Beckstoffer’s daring and novel way to raise the value of Napa Valley grapes so high that their preservation is assured is to tie the price of bottles of wine made from his fruit to what vintners pay him for the bunches.

Beckstoffer’s complex formula, Conaway writes, raises the price for his To Kalon cabernet sauvignon to $25,000 a ton for any vintner who asks $125 for each bottle bearing the vineyard name. By comparison, Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon this past harvest fetched an average price of nearly $7,500 per ton.

Beckstoffer’s plan, Conaway notes, has left him unpopular with vintners whose continuing success relies on his grapes. And whether Beckstoffer’s strategy actually helps to preserve vineyards or encourages more vineyard development on neighboring hills remains to be seen. (Beckstoffer declined to comment because he hadn’t yet read “Napa at Last Light.”)

While Beckstoffer, the Dunns and other farmers and winemakers are eager to maintain an environmental mix in Napa Valley, the region’s powerful wine-centric groups generally favor continued growth of wine tourism, Conaway writes.

At the same time, Napa Valley’s environmental groups, while also numerous and vocal, often are fractured and conflicted in their methods and goals.

How all these disparate forces ultimately shape Napa Valley, with or without potential complication from disease, climate change or a popping of the grape bubble, is far from settled, and while Conaway’s outlook is grim he clings to a thin thread of hope that the agrarian ideal will persevere.

“Real visionary people were there at first, and their agricultural and older American values should have prevailed, and they haven’t, but it isn’t too late to ameliorate the situation,” he writes. “It’s a moral issue, to hang on to what we have, in species and in places.”

Wine critic and competition judge Mike Dunne’s selections are based solely on open and blind tastings, judging at competitions, and visits to wine regions. He can be reached at dmichaeldunne@gmail.com.

Napa! What does that name
conjure up? Delicious wines?
A bucolic “paradise valley”
with thousands of green acres stretching from the Napa River to the Mayacamas Mountains to the west and
Howell Mountain to the east? Farmland undergoing rapid development?
It is all of these, but the reality is more
complicated. It is a microcosm of the
struggle going on across America between profit-driven development and
resource conservation.
Napa at Last Light: America’s Eden
in an Age of Calamity is the recently
published third volume of a trilogy on
this subject by James Conaway. The first in the series, Napa: the Story of an American Eden (1990), a New York Times best seller, describes this place where climate, soil, and weather conditionsare extraordinarily well-suited to the growing of grapes from which excellent winescan be produced. In thelate 19th century a few adventurers, including immigrants from Europe whobrought with them knowledge on how to grow grapes,
matching grapes to climate, and the
making of wine, came to the Napa
Valley. They produced wine profitably, built large mansions on the hillsides, and then the combination of
a grape disease and Prohibition shut
them down. In the 1960s, people eager to leave city life for a living in a
beautiful setting “rediscovered” Napa
and revived the wine industry. By 1976 the wineries that sprung
up in Napa Valley were producing
wine of such excellence that two
Napa vintages, a cabernet sauvignon
and a chardonnay, won a blind tasting in Paris against some of the
very best French wines. As the number of wineries expanded rapidly, other businesses began to arrive, bringing
construction equipment and traffic.
In 1968 the county wisely declared
agriculture to be the “highest and
best use” of the land and created in
the Napa Valley the first “agricultural
preserve” in the country. “Agriculture” included “the raising of crops,
trees, and livestock, [and] the production and processing of agricultural
products.” A house or farm building
required at least 40 acres.

Napa at Last Light begins with a recap of this history, and then brings the saga up to 2017. (Disclosure: I read and provided comments on an early draft of the book). Conaway has spent over 30 years traveling up and down the approximately 25 mile Napa Valley and the surrounding communities, getting to know the people, their desires, values, and personalities. As a result, reading his books is not just a story of the evolution of a community. It is also getting to know the grape growers, the wine-makers, and their families, many of the original owners, the preservationists, the concerned citizens, the new-comers looking to make big money fast, and the local officials. You encounter the organizations that spring up on all sides, and their interactions. After reading about the fist fight between Robert and Peter Mondavi to decide the ownership of the family business, you may never look at a bottle of Mondavi quite the same. There are now over 400 wineries in Napa Valley, and efforts continue to increase production and profits. Some winery owners tried to increase their production by bringing in grapes from outside the valley. This increased short-term profits, but eventually debased the value of the winery name when the public found out that their bottle of “Napa Valley” wine was made from mostly non-Napa grapes, and didn’t taste quite as good. To curtail this practice the county passed an ordinance in 1990 defining “Napa Valley” wine as being produced from at least 75 percent Napa Valley grapes. Also in 1990, with strong backing of citizens groups and environmentalists, Napa adopted an amendment to its general plan, known as Measure J, which stated that any change in land use provisions, whether by ordinance or permit, must first be subject to a popular referendum. This was challenged by winery owners and developers, but was upheld by the Cali- fornia Supreme Court in 1994. It has been invoked to challenge exceptions to land use laws with mixed success. Conaway’s second book in the trilogy, The Far Side of Eden: New
Money, Old Land and the Battle for
Napa Valley (2003), describes the
extraordinary wealth generated by
Napa’s wines, and the arrival of absentee corporate owners and real
estate developers whose main interest was making money. This led to
planting vineyards on steep slopes,
and the associated cutting of enormous numbers of trees, which in turn
led to erosion and pollution of the
Napa River, which runs from north
to south through the valley. The river
was home to salmon and steelhead before the deteriorating water quality drove them out. This development also began to take its toll on the appearance of the valley and the hillsides, including new structures, heavy traffic, dust, bulldozers, and other earth-moving equipment.

Many vineyard owners and
winemakers have long felt
they should be able to do whatever they want with their property. They began to chafe against the
strictures of the “agricultural preserve” and the definition of “agriculture.” Using their wealth and influence they have been able to persuade
local officials to overlook violations
and to allow planting on more acres
than authorized, illegal tree-cutting
and construction in the wrong places. The threat which climate change poses to future grape-growing has been ignored. Some owners expanded what once was known as a “tasting” to include food service tantamount to running
a restaurant. Promoted as the “full
wine experience,” the events are high
priced. Receptions and the like are
being held, and the sale of T-shirts,
bar equipment, and paraphernalia
unrelated to wine has sprung up. By 2008 the owners were promoting an expansion of the definition
of “agriculture” quoted above to include: “and related marketing, sales
and other accessory uses.” This would
legalize the excesses described above,
and more. They argued that the greater business and profits that could be
generated from these activities would
benefit everyone. There was widespread opposition among the other
residents. Many feared further destruction of the natural beauty of the valley, increased traffic and noise, and
further pollution of the Napa River,
which was already listed by EPA as
impaired under the Clean Water Act.
However, this change had support
among the planning department and
the board of supervisors, and was approved as a “minor” clarification with
minimal public notice.

While the owners reaped extraordinary profits, the farm workers and
many other residents were barely
getting by — some living in trailer
parks not visible to most tourists.
They resented the arrogance of the
owners and developers, who seemed
oblivious to the fact that their drive
to expand operations and convert
wineries into tourist attractions was
destroying the qualities of the valley
which brought people — including
many of the owners — there in the
first place.
To put the land use conflict into
human terms, Conaway discusses
several examples of profit-motivated
outsiders who came to the Napa Valley with the aim of
creating opulent wineries with no regard
for the impact which
development would
have on the environment. One grew up
in San Matteo, made a fortune during the tech boom, and
bought 40 acres on a mountain adjacent to a 3,000-acre wildlife preserve
and a state park, where he wanted to
plant a vineyard. This would involve
clear-cutting many large trees, removing boulders, and re-contouring the
land in an area that was ill-suited to
development. Outraged citizens organized a strong effort to block it, and
that battle continues. Another example was a Texas real
estate developer and part owner of the
Dallas Cowboys who wanted to clear
cut 500 acres, including an estimated
30,000 mature oak trees, ostensibly
for a vineyard. His massive infra-
structure plans strongly suggested an
intention to build a large number of
“ranchettes.” He had done a similar development in neighboring Sonoma
County. Surveys indicated that the
land disturbance would cause significant erosion, damaging Napa’s drinking water supply, adversely affecting
fish populations, and destabilizing
downhill soil. The public, fed up
with deforestation and environmental destruction, rallied to oppose this.
But the developer began a campaign
of misinformation and bullying, and
the county supervisors allowed the
project to proceed. Lawsuits were immediately filed.

Conservation-minded citizens
then drafted a proposed water and
woodland protection initiative, and
quickly gathered more than twice the
number of signatures needed to get
on the ballot for the 2016 election.
The board of supervisors initially approved it to go on the ballot. Then
they rejected it on the technicality,
rarely invoked, that it failed to attach
copies of regulations that might be affected. The citizens were left to start
the process over again for the 2018
ballot, amid protests of “voter suppression.”
Near the end of the book Conaway observes: “‘Eden’ is a figurative
stretch for what the valley once represented, but all vestiges of that early in-
nocence are lost. The remnant fig leaf
kept in place by the wine and hospitality industries grows more tattered
every year, revealing more schemes to
transform a way of life into a market-
able experience as or more valuable
than the thing itself.”
Napa at Last Light is a very engaging read and carries some important
messages. The struggle going on in
the Napa Valley is similar to struggles
between developers and conservationists all across the country. At a
time when our national leaders are
calling for less regulation and making it more difficult to protect our
environment, this book could not be
more timely.
Ridgway Hall is vice chair of the Chesapeake Legal Alliance. Email: ridgehall@
gmail.com. * To order Napa at Last Light go to:

Sunday, February 4, 2018

SECOND TIME AROUND After being disqualified over a technicality in 2016, the Watershed and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative is back on the ballot in June.

A June ballot initiative that would limit removal of oak trees for new vineyards has exposed rifts within Napa County's wine industry.

The Watershed and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative would cap oak removal from hillsides in an effort supporters say is designed to preserve remaining hillside habitat and protect fragile watersheds.

Supporters submitted more than 7,000 signatures to the county elections office last month. Only 3,800 signatures were required to qualify it for the ballot. County election officials certified the signatures earlier this month. Among other things, the measure would cap future oak-forest removal for new vineyards at 795 acres.

This is the legislation's second time around, albeit in a different form. It was on the ballot in June 2016, but the county invalidated it before election day because of a technicality. At that time, the county's wine and agricultural industry organizations presented a united front against the initiative, a measure they claimed was unnecessary given the regulations winegrowers already face.

A number of those groups—the Napa County Farm Bureau, the Napa Valley Grapegrowers and the Winegrowers of Napa Valley—all oppose the proposed legislation this time around too. But in the case of the powerful Napa Valley Vintners (NVV) trade group, their opposition constitutes an about-face that is rankling winemakers inside the member-based organization and out.

Last year, initiative organizer Mike Hackett got a cold call from NVV government relations director Rex Stults who said he wanted to discuss possible collaboration. Hackett says he was skeptical about the overture, but says Stults reached out to him because polls revealed the measure would likely pass.

"That really shook them up," he says.

A small group from the NVV, which included former board chair Michael Honig, met over lunch with Hackett and his co-organizer Jim Wilson.

"It was cordial," says Hackett.

The group continued to meet over the next seven months and agreed to compromise on the proposed streamside setbacks and settled on the 795-acre cap. This unlikely meeting between wine industry and environmental activists bore fruit. In September, the NVV board voted unanimously to support the initiative. The Napa County Board of Supervisors praised the bipartisan compromise.

But the good feelings didn't last long.

When the greater membership of the 500-member NVV and Napa's other wine and agriculture industry groups learned of the proposed legislation the two sides hammered out, the pushback was loud and often vitriolic, says Honig.

"I was surprised how angry people got," he says. "When the board saw what the pushback was, they got nervous."

A few weeks later, the NVV board voted to suspend its support for the very legislation it helped write. On Jan. 11, the board voted unanimously to oppose the initiative. In a statement, the organization said its opposition is based on the sentiments of a majority of its members and their belief that the initiative is "legally uncertain" and fear of "unintended consequences for agriculture if it becomes law."

"The NVV believes the initiative is not the proper way to further the goal of protecting Napa County's woodlands and watershed," the statement said.

Napa Valley Vintners communications director Patsy McGaughy would not provide further explanation or say what is the proper way to protect woodland and watershed areas. Stults would not comment. It's not clear whether the NVV will actively campaign against the initiative.

As the compromise heads to the polls, a group of winemakers, some of whom are members of the NVV, are banding together in support of the initiative. Among them is famed vintner and NVV member Warren Winiarski.

In 1976, a bottle of Winiarski's first vintage of Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon placed first among French and California red wines at the legendary Judgment of Paris tasting. But in his support for the ballot initiative, Winiarski recalls another key date in the Napa Valley.

"This initiative will support the work I was involved in back in 1968," he says, referring to the creation of the county's historic agricultural preserve, an ordinance widely touted for keeping housing development pressure at bay and allowing the wine industry to thrive. "It's strengthening something that needs strengthening."

The agricultural preserve marks it 50th anniversary this year, an event both sides of the debate are citing to make their case.

Winiarski and his winemaker allies say now Napa Valley needs protection from wineries and vineyards which they say are exploiting their status in the agricultural preserve at the expense of water quality, biodiversity and the carbon capturing potential of trees.

Were the initiative to fail, says Winiarski, "it would have quite a negative impact on the totality of what this valley is about."

Winemaker Randy Dunn, who is not a NVV member, is also joining the effort in support of the initiative.

"We've got to save what we've got left," he says, rejecting the charge that the initiative is anti-agriculture.

"Some people are dumb enough to think if we don't keep planting grapes we'll end up like Santa Clara County. It's not going to make any winemakers go bankrupt."

Hackett says that while the wine industry is divided, he believes support for the measure is strong.

"We have wide community support, and we're going to win this."

In spite of his advisory status on the NVV board, which is now chaired by Opus One Winery CEO David Pearson, Honig says he's going to vote for the initiative. While he says many of his winemaker colleagues have legitimate concerns about it, he doesn't think it will have the devastating impact some critics fear, and there are more pressing issues to be concerned with.

"This [issue] is just a blip," he says.

He says his goal in reaching out to the authors of the initiative was to improve on the 2016 version and make it more palatable to the wine industry since it was headed for the ballot again.

"I believe we achieved that," he says. "I'm not frustrated with the product, but I'm frustrated with all the angst within my industry."